You will achieve what you want to achieve, only if you can cope with the theory of altruism.

[Letter to his wife, Natalia Sedova]In addition to the happiness of being a fighter for the cause of socialism, fate gave me the happiness of being her husband. During the almost forty years of our life together she remained an inexhaustible source of love, magnanimity, and tenderness. She underwent great sufferings, especially in the last period of our lives. But I find some comfort in the fact that she also knew days of happiness.For forty-three years of my conscious life I have remained a revolutionist; for forty-two of them I have fought under the banner of Marxism. If I had to begin all over again I would of course try to avoid this or that mistake, but the main course of my life would remain unchanged. I shall die a proletarian revolutionist, a Marxist, a dialectical materialist, and, consequently, an irreconcilable atheist. My faith in the communist future of mankind is not less ardent, indeed it is firmer today, than it was in the days of my youth.Natasha has just come up to the window from the courtyard and opened it wider so that the air may enter more freely into my room. I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression and violence, and enjoy it to the full.

You will know who truly loves you when you ask them to do an uncoventional favor.

For me and my friends, for people who think the way I do over there, for all ordinary Soviet citizens, America evokes a mixture of admiration and compassion...You're a country of the future, a young country, with yet untapped possiblities, enormous territory, great breadth of spirit, generosity, magnanimity. But these qualities—strength, generosity, and magnanimity—are usually combined in a man and even in a whole country with trustfulness. And this has already done you a disservice several times.

Stars shine even for those who refuse to look up.

In War: Resolution,In Defeat: Defiance,In Victory: MagnanimityIn Peace: Good Will.

Losing well was a gift, but winning well is this stuff of the authentic manhood.

You need to accept your greatness, you need to rise up into your full stature, because if you don’t, you are going to continually bow down low to enter into the caves of those who would have you believing that you were born for caves; when in fact, those are their caves and they were born for them. You think that you’re not allowed to stand tall in your mind, heart and body— but you are! And when you do, you’ll see how little those caves and the people in them, really are. It’s difficult, because you want everyone to matter, but really, most of them just don’t. Only a few do. Most of them aren’t even worth being mad at.